SK Hynix Extends Slide With 4.8% Drop After 10% Plunge as Samsung Steadies

SK Hynix shares fell 4.8% in Seoul trading on Thursday, August 7, deepening a selloff that erased roughly 10% of the memory chipmaker’s value a day earlier — a two-session drop of close to 15% for one of the Korean market’s heaviest index weights. Samsung Electronics, which lost 6.3% in Wednesday’s rout, broke from its rival and closed 0.2% higher, an early sign that investors are beginning to treat Korea’s two memory giants differently.

A Two-Day Rout Concentrated in One Name

Wednesday’s session was broadly punishing for Korean semiconductor shares: Samsung Electronics ended down 6.3% while SK Hynix fell more than 10%, with foreign and institutional investors driving the selling. Thursday told a different story. Samsung opened firmer, trading up more than 1% in the early session, and held on to a modest 0.2% gain by the close. SK Hynix also started the day in positive territory before turning lower and finishing down 4.8% — meaning the second leg of the decline was carried almost entirely by one stock.

That divergence matters. When both names fall together, the move usually reflects a sector-wide or macro repricing. When one stabilizes and the other keeps falling, the market is making a company-specific judgment — about valuation after a steep run, positioning, or relative exposure to whatever triggered the initial break.

The Stakes: A Pillar of the AI Memory Trade

The scale of the move is significant because of what SK Hynix has become. Alongside Samsung Electronics and Micron, the Icheon-based company is one of three producers that dominate global memory-chip output, and its customer roster includes Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple — the core of the AI infrastructure buildout. The company reported revenue of 66.19 trillion won and net profit of 19.80 trillion won for fiscal 2024, a record-setting year powered by high-bandwidth memory demand. A double-digit single-day decline in a stock of that scale removes tens of trillions of won in market value and weighs directly on the KOSPI, where the two chipmakers together account for an outsized share of index capitalization.

Corporate Housekeeping Continues Beneath the Volatility

While the share price swung, SK Hynix’s regulatory filings pointed to business as usual on the capital-returns front. The company lodged disclosures with Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service confirming a decision on cash and in-kind dividends, along with the closure of its shareholder registry to fix the record date for that payout. Neither filing addresses the share-price decline, but the timing underscores a gap between the market’s short-term repricing and the company’s own operating cadence. A separate filing from Samsung Electronics — a routine report on securities holdings by an executive or major shareholder — landed in the same window.

What the Divergence Leaves Open

Two sessions do not settle whether this is a correction within an uptrend or the start of a broader retreat from Korean memory names. The pattern so far — indiscriminate selling on day one, followed by a split in which Samsung recovered and SK Hynix did not — suggests the market is still working out how much of the damage belongs to the sector and how much to the individual stock. With foreign and institutional flows having led the downside, their behavior in the coming sessions will indicate whether Thursday’s stabilization in Samsung marks the floor of this episode or merely a pause in it.